Haskell Weekly News: June 21, 2009

Welcome to issue 122 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Are you ready for the 12th Annual
ICFP programming contest? It begins this Friday, don't miss it!
Let's reclaim Haskell's rightful place as the programming language of
choice for discriminating hackers.

Announcements

Haskell
protocol-buffers version 1.5.0. Chris Kuklewicz
announced
version 1.5.0 of the protocol-buffers,
protocol-buffers-descriptor,
and hprotoc
packages to Hackage. This catches up to Google's version 2.1.0: support
for "repeated" fields for primitive types; fields can now be marked
deprecated; the type name resolver will no longer resolve type names to
fields; and more.

12th Annual ICFP Contest. Mark Huntington Snyder
announced
the 12th Annual ICFP Programming
Contest, hosted by the University of Kansas Computer Systems
Design Laboratory at the Information and Telecommunication Technology
Center. The contest will be held on the weekend of June 26-29. The
contest task will be released sixteen seconds after 13:00 Central
Daylight Time (US) on Friday, and entries will be accepted until
13:00:16 CDT on Monday. There is no preregistration required, and
participation is free and open to all. Teams may participate from
any location, and may use any programming language(s). Read the contest blog or subscribe to
the RSS feed
to receive timely updates before and during the contest.

clock 0.1 released. Cetin Sert
announced
the release of clock,
a package for convenient access to high-resolution clock and timer
functions of different operating systems. It is planned to consist of
two layers; the lower layer will provide direct access to OS-specific
clock and timer functions like clock_gettime of Posix or GetTickCount
of Windows, and its upper layer shall then provide a common API for all
supported systems. Currently only the lower level is being developed.

Turbinado V0.7. Alson Kemp
announced
version 0.7 of Turbinado,
a Ruby-On-Rails-like web server and web framework for Haskell. It
is designed to make creating web application using Haskell
both easy and joyful. The primary additions in version 0.7 are
FastCGI support and a new templating system (which includes
HAML and HTML support). Additional details can be found here.

haskeline-class. Antoine Latter
announcedhaskeline-class,
a small library providing a newtyped MonadState instance for haskeline
which lifts the class operations to an inner monad (as opposed to its
existing instance).

hyena. Johan Tibell
announced
the first release of hyena,
a library for building web servers, based on the work on iteratee style I/O
by Oleg Kiselyov. The library allows you to create web servers that
consume their input incrementally, without resorting to lazy I/O. This
should lead to more predictable resource usage.

Fwd: Boston Haskell June 23rd meeting: openings for Lightning
Talks. Ravi Nanavati
announced
that there are several available slots for "lightning"
(5 minute) talks at the June 23 meeting of the Boston
Area Haskell Users' Group.

haskell-src-exts 1.0.0 rc1. Niklas Broberg
announced
a series of release candidates for haskell-src-exts-1.0.0 (as of this
writing, the most recent release candidate is version 0.5.6). This
version is intended to fully support parsing of almost all Haskell
extensions. Please help with testing!

BostonHaskell: Next meeting - June 23rd at MIT CSAIL Reading Room
(32-G882). Ravi Nanavati
announced
the second meeting of the Boston
Area Haskell Users' Group, scheduled for Tuesday, June 23rd from
6:30pm - 8:30pm. It will be held in the MIT CSAIL Reading Room (32-G882,
i.e. a room on the 8th floor of the Gates Tower of the MIT's Stata Center
at 32 Vassar St in Cambridge, MA). Talks include "Automagic Font Conversion
with Haskell Typeclasses" by Frank Berthold, and "Intermediate Language
Representations via GADTs" by Nirav Dave.

traversal transformations. Sjoerd Visscher
exhibited
some code for Church-encoded container
structures using their Foldable instance, and later announced
the fmlist
package based on the same code, along with a surprising example of a lazy
'middle-infinite' list (where elements can be taken from the beginning
or the end!).

hledger 0.6 released. Simon Michael
announced
the release of hledger 0.6. See the
announcement for a list of the new features and other information.

Discussion

Revamping the module hierarchy. Johan Tibell
began an interesting discussion
about package names, module names, and the module hierarchy.

Confusion on the third monad law when using lambda
abstractions. Jon Strait
asked
about the third monad law, leading to some clarification on what precisely
the law says, and some interesting discussion on idiomatic use of the (<=

Need some help with an infinite list. Gunther Schmidt
asked
for some help generating a particular infinite list, and got a number
of interesting suggestions.

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them!